utils4bioinformatics: all those “little snippets” in one place

Over the years, I’ve written a lot of small “utility scripts”. You know the kind of thing. Little code snippets that facilitate research, rather than generate research results. For example: just what are the fields that you can use to qualify Entrez database searches?

Typically, they end up languishing in long-forgotten Dropbox directories. Sometimes, the output gets shared as a public link. No longer! As of today, “little code snippets that do (hopefully) useful things” have a new home at Github.

Also as of today: there’s not much there right now, just the aforementioned Entrez database code and output. I’m not out to change the world here, just to do a little better.

Inspiring! To not (let somebody else) reuse your code is considered one of the seven sins in bioinformatics, because it causes a lot of duplicate efforts. My main feeble excuse not to share my snippets of code: I am a researcher not a software developer, so I write crappy code (that will not take into account somebody else’s data formats) and don’t really have time to maintain the code and offer support or thorough documentation. However, every once and awhile I produce, what I would consider, a small coding gem. I should share these…